"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

ElectroRetro

1/ Purple Legacy

As Angus Finlayson notes in his review of this comp for FACT, it does seem a trifle premature to doing a retrospective on a sub-flava of post-dubstep that was in vogue only three years ago, But that's what Purple Legacy: A History of Purple Wow is doing viz-a-viz the sound invented by Joker, Guido, and Gemmy.

The hallmark of genres in the age of hyperstasis/atemporality is their accelerated life-arc and their inconsequentiality: they disseminate superfast, but burn out quick, leaving little trace in terms of influence... that's what seapunk was parodying

2/ Electrospective

A website launched by EMI, as part of their campaign to celebrate the legacy and living-ongoing history of electronic music (which involves a double CD compilation, promotion of classic albums, a round table discussion event, competitions, etc). Skewered here by Rory Gibb at the Quietus, who also invokes the dystopian image of the future: "Imagine crap trance riffs and recycled one note basslines stomping on a human face, for ever."

Personally I think EDM / Skrillex-Deadmau5-Bassnectar-stuff, as a bastardising/popularising move that brings out yet again the buried rock-ness of rave, may well be a positive development. After all, they dissed ardkore as "heavy metal house" in 91-92, you know! Devolution of a style actually still represents a linearity, a kind of forward-logic, as opposed to the endless recursive involutions of hyperstasis (postdubstep, post-mnml, etc). Certainly I wouldn't be surprised at all if this EDM moment had more fruitful and consequential reverberations than pico-genres like Purple.